Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDDs) are characterized by severe and pervasive impairment in several areas of development: reciprocal social interaction skills, communication or the presence of stereotyped behavior, interests, and activities. The qualitative impairments that define these conditions are distinctly deviant relative to the individual's developmental level or mental age. PDDs include Autistic Disorder, Rett's Disorder, Childhood Disintegrative Disorder, Asperger's Disorder, and Pervasive Development Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS), Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) are a group of developmental disabilities characterized by atypical development in socialization, communication and behavior. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that an average of 1 in 110 children in the U.S. has ASD (www.cdc.gov). A child classified as autistic must show delays in the development of: social interaction, communication and behaviors. Social interaction includes non-verbal behaviors such as eye contact or gaze, facial expression, body posturing and gestures that regulate social interaction. Children with ASD usually exhibit difficulty in responding appropriately to sensory messages.
Asperger's Syndrome differs from other autism spectrum disorders by its relative preservation of linguistic and cognitive development. It is much like autism in that those affected may have difficulty picking up on social cues, body language, and speech pitch and tone, and they may have difficulty overall with social situations. Other similarities include dislike of routine changes, fixation or hyper focus on specific interests, talking a lot and about only their own interests, and increased sensitivity of one or more of the five senses.
While there is currently no specific cure for Autism, there are biomedical, therapeutic and educational treatment plans to remediate the delayed development and ameliorate behaviors, Social interventions use structured and planned curricula to teach social behaviors to children with ASD. However, social interventions to date are limited in the extent to which they address socially coordinated interaction.
Applied behavior analysis (ABA) relies on one-on-one teaching that aims to modify the child's behavior by reinforcing the child to practice various skills. This type of program usually is done at the home of the child with an ABA therapist supervising. Because of these characteristics of the treatment, it can be exceptionally expensive, unaffordable by many families, and outside funding for such treatment can be very difficult to gain. Further, there are various levels of training and expertise in providing therapy. There is therefore a need to standardize level of care.
Treatments for ASD fall into two categories, cognitive and behavioral. The present embodiment of the invention is primarily for behavioral diagnosis and treatment therapy. Alternate embodiments or configurations of the invention may be utilized for cognitive therapy including academic exercises in addition to, or instead of, behavioral therapy.
Research has shown that early interventions can improve outcomes. Traditionally, autism is diagnosed by a clinician who directly interacts with the child. Due to the fact that the clinician cannot repeat the exact same actions each visit with the child and it takes several periods of interacting with the child to gain a diagnosis, the clinician could diagnose children differently each time. This present intention for diagnosis makes the tests more repeatable and accessible thus making the diagnosis more reliable. In an embodiment of the present invention, a low-cost portable robotic device may provide the ability expedite diagnosis in rural areas or other locations where direct access to clinicians is limited. A webcam may be used to telecommunicate between a doctor and children to improve the number of patients that can be assessed to speed diagnosis, this further enabling early intervention. The present invention may be used either for remote controlled interactions with manual assessment, or may be used to assist in automated or semi-automated diagnosis and therapy.
Technology is being used increasingly to help diagnose autism at earlier ages. Kozima et al. designed a 4 degree of freedom (DOT) interactive robot Keepon to interact with children with autism. This simple and adorable robot gave the children a playful and joyful mood and helped them to transfer the interpersonal communication learnt with Keepon to triadic play with adults or other children, Campolo et al. utilized sensors to detect abnormalities in infants targeting abnormalities that would point to autism. These sensors test the children's responsiveness to visual and audio cues, how they move their arms and legs, and how they handle and play with a ball.
Other authors investigated how a small minimally expressive humanoid robot can assume the role of a social mediator—encouraging children with autism to interact with the robot, to break their isolation and importantly, to facilitate interaction with other people. They demonstrate that the robot effectively helped to mediate and encourage interaction between the children and co-present adults.
The manifestation of PDDs such as autism spectrum disorder, the scarcity of evaluation of syndrome status, and the formidable high cost of clinical diagnosis necessitates the development of a low cost tool to aid the diagnosis and therapy of ASD for healthcare center, special education school and even home application.